Why online collaboration is the future of work

Breaking news this week is Salesforce’s US$27.7 billion mega-offer to buy Slack.

It’s a strong signal about the future of work where enterprise software powers all-digital, work-from-anywhere teams to co-create and collaborate.

At Mindhive, we share this vision of collaborative intelligence, reduced complexity, increased power and flexibility, and ultimately a greater degree of organisational agency and agility around problem solving.

This kind of innovation is incredibly disruptive to the traditional consulting industry.

According to the late great Clayton M. Christensen (1952–2020), author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, “We’re still early in the story of consulting’s disruption … More likely than not, alarms won’t sound until it’s already too late in the game.”

Christensen specifically cited management consulting as vulnerable to disruptive innovation because there are only a few major players, who have been slow to adopt technology, and therefore continue to operate old-school business models relying on junior talent to crunch out billable hours and 2×2 matrices.

The traditional consulting model has been called out by Former PM Malcolm Turnbull in his autobiography A Bigger Picture and also by Judo Bank CEO & co-founder Joseph Healy in his book Breaking the Banks.

At its best, external consulting is a way to outsource strategic problem solving but increasingly in the 21st century our problems so incredibly complex that they cannot be solved with 20th century thinking and methodologies.

At its worst, external consulting is a cynical exercise by governments and corporations seeking to transfer risk onto someone else’s brand equity and professional indemnity policy.

Mindhive brings a totally different approach.

We were founded as a not-for-profit think tank and developed our tech platform for ourselves. Then we realised we were sitting on commercial gold because no one else had built what we had.

Mindhive is the future of consulting.

We harness the power of collaborative intelligence powered by technology to approach problems totally differently.

Mindhive CEO Bruce Muirhead

In November we welcomed our 11,000th member. That’s quite a crowd! We’ve built an automated workflow following principles of design thinking such as Brief, Discuss, Ideate, Poll and Conclude. And we are Covid-safe being fully digital, solving problems 24/7 securely on our Cloud-hosted platform.

The skills to solve problems are latent within every organisation. A corporation’s own employees know the situation much better than an external consultant. Corporations can buy a license for a private and confidential instance of Mindhive to solve their own problems with internal or external facilitation and our platform’s purpose-built tool kit.

We are already kicking goals for entities like Austrade, QUT and Kate Carnell’s Office of the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman. Many small consulting firms use us to compete at the same level as the big firms. We have a growing list of ASX quoted corporations interested in remote co-creation and collaboration projects and two of the “Big 4” firms want to partner with us. They are choosing to use our platform because it delivers greater collaboration, accesses higher-order thinking and solves challenges at scale with speed.

Mindhive is the future of finding answers.

Mindhive gets the right people in the (virtual) room; gets them engaged; provides ways of making sense of contributions to identify insight; rewards engagement; and enables a marketplace and two-sided network model to enhance access to additional tools and capabilities.

Unique to Mindhive is the intelligent way that our platform’s algorithm convenes individuals and organisations with a network of innovative minds and provides tools for rapid insight.

Throwing everyone into a crowd and asking them questions is easy; keeping them engaged and on the topic is quite difficult.

Mindhive is the future of impact.

Right now, we are hosting a public discussion and engagement on the topic of childcare. The results of this will be used to inform a White Paper to influence government policy. We are also hosting challenges related to climate change, Covid-19, bitcoin, small business, the future of work and female founders.

In a year like no other, we’ve grown our member base by 22% and signed corporate partners like American Express.

There’s so much more to come which is why we are currently raising growth capital via an equity crowd fund on the Birchal platform.